Announced only one and a half year ago and launched later, HTC has informed its users that it will shut-down HTCSense.com - until further notice. HTCSense.com, which was a series of free connected services, was designed to allow HTC customers to simply manage their mobile phone experience from their HTC phone or PC. For example, users were able to easily locate a missing phone by triggering the handset to ring loudly, even if it was set to silent, or to flag its location on a map. If the phone's been lost or stolen, users were able to remotely lock the phone, forward calls and texts to another phone, send a message to the phone to arrange its return or even remotely wipe all personal data from it.

HTCSense.com also made it easy to setup a new HTC phone or access archived mobile content such as contacts, text messages and call history from a PC browser. People were also able to customize their phones with exclusive HTC content like wallpapers, HTC scenes, sounds or plug-ins.

However, in a yesterday sent customer notification, HTC informed its HTCSense.com users, that HTCSense.com will undergo a renovation to improve the services and value it delivers to its customers. Until the new services are ready, features previously available on HTCSense.com will be shutting down. However, HTC offers the download of the previously synchronized contacts, messages, footprints or call history and these data can be downloaded hrough April 30, 2012. After April 30, user data will no longer be accessible and will be deleted.

While HTC mentioned that it plans to renovate its online service, it has not yet mentioned when or how it will be relaunched. Maybe it won't be relaunched anytime soon since it looks a little bit that HTC is again leaving its strategy to become a full service provider, with hardware and services but maybe HTC is again concentrating a little bit more on its device hardware and services, running on the devices itself.